Benjamin acknowledged with gratitude every effort to safeguard his manuscripts. He appreciated a bibliographic mention of his works, published by the historian and theologian Karl Thieme in a journal titled Religious Reflection: it was “a genuine endorsement to hear of a reader here and there, who has been able to make himself at home in my scraps of writings, in some way or another” (GB IV, p. 394). He saw himself “in a span of history and life,” as he explained to Scholem in February 1935, “in which the final collecting together of the infinite scraps of my production seems less conceivable, indeed more improbable than ever” (GB V, p. 47). It was impossible for him to gather the scraps together, but it is owing to his calculations and the conscientiousness of his friends, that the improbable was still possible after his death. His bequest bears witness to the dogged attempt to write under adverse conditions.
And it tells the story of an extraordinary writing project in which aestheticism and pragmatism are held in balance. Benjamin used the choicest materials. But to an increasing degree, his life situation made any luxury in his working conditions impossible. In exile, it would seem, economic need dictated that everything he got his hands on be used (or re-used): the reverse sides of letters sent to him, postcards or an invitation to review, library forms, travel tickets, proofs, an advertisement for “S. Pellegrino,” prescription pads discarded by his friend Fritz Fränkel, doctor and drug connoisseur (figs 2.3–2.9). The formats are fascinating: some scraps are no bigger than 4.5cm × 9cm. But Benjamin was able to utilize every last square millimeter. And he left behind a wealth of compressed sheets, notes, scraps, on which his great work unfolds richly detailed.
The structure of Benjamin’s bequest is not only indebted to necessity. It exhibits idiosyncrasies in its modes of production, peculiar methods of thought and writing. “An economy of scraps just like in my family,” a distant relation exclaimed recently on seeing Benjamin’s condensed notes. Benjamin wrote constantly. When an idea occurred to him he did not delay its writing down by seeking out the right piece of paper, but rather used the nearest suitable thing at hand. In this way key thoughts are fixed in passing, “scrawled down,” often on the margins of other works or directly interleaved in them (figs 2.10 and 2.11). And of course he knew the meaning of the concept “verzetteln” prevalent in library science or lexicography: “to excerpt,” “to disperse things that belong together into individual slips or into the form of a card index.”
The court library at Vienna introduced a card index catalog around 1780, because the bound catalog could not accommodate the flood of entries. Parish registers are entered on slips or even card, in order to be able to deploy the individual entries independently of the place of their transmission, and to be able to order them according to different criteria. Transfer to individual scraps or cards makes possible lexical projects such as the Goethe-Dictionary, which began to index the Weimar edition on slips of paper in 1946. Slips or their stronger sisters, index cards—of which the Journal for Organisation declared in 1929, “cards can do everything”—stand out because of their flexibility, and thus they represent modernity.
Benjamin recognized the artistic potential of this method of sorting: Mallarmé named as his own “a working instrument for poetry in the form of a card file” (SW 4, p. 117). In the section “Attested Auditor of Books”, in One-Way Street, Benjamin points out a revolution in the administration of knowledge. The present mode of scholarly production demonstrates that the book is already “an outdated mediation between two different filing systems”: “For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index” (SW I, p. 456). Benjamin repeatedly treated the elements of his text according to the principle of building blocks: he copied them out, cut them out, stuck them on new sheets of paper and arranged them anew, long before such procedures became established in electronic word-processing under the name “copy and paste”—and before the appearance of the German computer program Zettelwirtschaft [Paper Jumble], which was developed to order and re-order notes. Benjamin’s idea of composing a work entirely of quotations ensures that the material within the collection can remain mobile, elements can be shifted at will. At the outset all material is of equal value: knowledge that is organized in slips and scraps knows no hierarchy.
Figures
2.1 Types of Knowledge (1921)—Manuscript, one side. Compare GS VI, p. 48.
2.2 Language and Logic 1 (1921)—Manuscript, one side. Compare SW 1, p. 272.
2.3 and 2.4 Notes for Franz Kafka (1934)—Manuscript, one side, with reverse side (extract). Compare GS II.3, p. 1207.
2.5 and 2.6 Proust and Kafka. Notes for Franz Kafka (1934)—Manuscript, one side, with reverse side. Compare GS II.3, p. 1221.
2.7 What is Aura?—Manuscript, one side.
2.8 and 2.9 Bibliographic notes—Manuscript, one side, with reverse side. These bibliographical notes on a purchase voucher are probably connected to Benjamin’s montage of letters for the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution, which appeared in the journal Europe on July 15, 1939 under the title “Allemands de quatre-vingt-neuf.”
Itemized here are, amongst other things, the biography of Seume by Oskar Planer and Camillo Reißmann (1898), the books Biedermeier in Chains (1924) and Prohibited Literature from Classical Times to the Present (1925) by Heinrich Hubert Houben, Gustav Landauer’s Letters from the French Revolution, Herder’s Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, Benjamin’s “Introduction to Jochmann,” Correspondence by Georg Forster and a letter from Jochmann to Kant.
2.10 and 2.11 Note for On the Concept of History: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But perhaps it is quite different. Perhaps revolutions are what happens when the humanity travelling in this train snatches at the emergency brake.” (c. 1940)—Manuscript, one side, with reverse side. The reverse side appears to show calculations relating to the cost of a lunch. Compare GS 1.3, p. 1232.
Fig. 2.1
Fig. 2.1
Types of Knowledge
| I | The knowledge of truth |
| This does not exist. For truth is the death of intention | |
| II | Redemptive knowledge |
| This is the knowledge that dawns with redemption, which is thereby completed But it is not the knowledge that precipitates redemption | |
| III | Teachable knowledge |
| Its most significant form of appearance is banality | |
| IV | Determining knowledge |
| There is knowledge that determines action. It is, however, not determining as a “motive,” but rather due to the force of its linguistic structure. The linguistic moment in morality
|